Understanding Chinese students’ values – insights for tomorrow’s managers

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the values of Chinese university students as future leaders and employees in a global economy. Despite the fact that China’s role in the world economy has become increasingly important, little has been done to examine the nature of tomorrow’s Chinese business leaders. Design/methodology/approach A values survey was administered to business major students at a Tier 1 Chinese university and data were collected from 984 respondents to test five hypotheses relevant to values for Chinese youths. Findings This study suggests that today’s Chinese business students view traditional Chinese values through a lens influenced by western cultural and economic thinking as well as positive and negative impacts from rapid economic development. Research limitations/implications This paper is an empirical study based on a survey being administered to Chinese university students in two major cities in China. A limitation would be that all Chinese youth of the same age may not have the same values as this set of university students, or even those of Chinese students from a different region of China. Originality/value This paper is among the first to identify the current cultural values of the younger Chinese of university age population.

Humility as enlightened leadership: a Chinese perspective

“…Each of these qualities associated with humility enhances the leader's capacity to be perceived as personally credible, an exemplar of behavior dedicated to the organization, and worthy of other's followership (Owens and Hekman, 2016). These six qualities are not only often associated with humility but are qualities acknowledged to be associated with enlightened leadership and personal character (Anderson and Caldwell, 2018;Cao et al, 2018).…”

“…The importance of understanding Chinese values and culture has been a topic of importance for decades as China has grown in economic significance internationally (Chen et al, 2009;Hofstede, 2001). Cao et al (2018) are among many who have most recently commented on the importance of leaders understanding Chinese values in order to work more effectively with present and future Chinese employees. Comparing Chinese values related to humility and leadership is particularly relevant because of the prominence of collectivism in the Chinese value system.…”

“…Otherwise, the research from these findings suggests that humility in its nuanced forms continues to be a major value for Chinese employees and should be acknowledged as leaders interact with their Chinese counterparts (cf. Cao et al, 2018).…”

“…The growing importance of understanding the Chinese culture, and particularly the attitudes of young Chinese students who will be the future leaders of tomorrow's businesses, has begun to be studied in earnest by many scholars (Cao et al, 2018;Chiu et al, 2012). In particular, the increasing importance of humility as a factor associated with Chinese individuals was identified as important by Chen et al (2009).…”

Editorial A new research agenda for decentering public leadership

“…Scholars, not least in this journal, have explored public leadership as a collective (Miao and Ju, 2020; Torfing et al , 2019), multilevel (Capler, 2020), and highly relational (McClellan, 2020) endeavor. Furthermore, they have developed an appreciation of leadership as imbued with public values (Cao et al , 2018), pointing to particular ethical dimensions (Hattke and Hattke, 2019; Özsungur, 2020) of public leadership. The following discussion identifies several areas where the public leadership literature has developed over recent years and where there is some commonality and contradiction with a decentered approach, most notably:public values;narratives and storytelling;distributed and collaborative leadership;relational leadership.…”